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| Aldous Huxley |
Albert Speer, minister for armaments in Adolph
Hitler’s government, said these words when he publicly apologized during the
Nuremberg trial:
Hitler’s dictatorship
differed in one fundamental point from all predecessors in history: it was the
first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a
dictatorship that made complete use of all technical means for the domination
of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the
loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought.
Since the days of Hitler, the technological
tools that a dictator can use to manipulate the masses have come a long way. In
addition to radio and loud-speakers, cinema and the press, available to Hitler,
we now have television, sound and image recording, mobile phones that provide
countless information, computers capable of processing it, and social networks,
which are becoming one of the most powerful instruments of social manipulation in
existence.
As I said in another post on this blog, these tools are neither good nor bad: what is
good or bad is their use. All can be used well, and all can be misused. Do we
have controls to prevent their being misused? Or do we know that they are actually
being misused?
